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We've Already Built too Many Power Plants and Cars to Prevent 1.5 °C of Warming:
In a [...] paper published in Nature today[*], researchers found we're now likely to sail well past 1.5 ˚C of warming, the aspirational limit set by the Paris climate accords, even if we don't build a single additional power plant, factory, vehicle, or home appliance. Moreover, if these components of the existing energy system operate for as long as they have historically, and we build all the new power facilities already planned, they'll emit about two thirds of the carbon dioxide necessary to crank up global temperatures by 2 ˚C.
If fractions of a degree don't sound that dramatic, consider that 1.5 ˚C of warming could already be enough to expose 14% of the global population to bouts of severe heat, melt nearly 2 million square miles (5 million square kilometers) of Arctic permafrost, and destroy more than 70% of the world's coral reefs. The hop from there to 2 ˚C may subject nearly three times as many people to heat waves, thaw nearly 40% more permafrost, and all but wipe out coral reefs, among other devastating effects, research finds.
The basic conclusion here is, in some ways, striking. We've already built a system that will propel the planet into the dangerous terrain that scientists have warned for decades we must avoid. This means that building lots of renewables and adding lots of green jobs, the focus of much of the policy debate over climate, isn't going to get the job done.
We now have to ask a much harder societal question: How do we begin forcing major and expensive portions of existing energy infrastructure to shut down years, if not decades, before the end of its useful economic life?
Power plants can cost billions of dollars and operate for half a century. Yet the study notes that the average age of coal plants in China and India—two of the major drivers of the increase in "committed emissions" since the earlier paper—is about 11 and 12 years, respectively.
[*] Monday.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @01:53PM (58 children)
Just askin', how much % of CO2 is man related, or anthropogenic if you like big words, compared to total emissions?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @02:40PM (16 children)
The better question to ask is WTF is with the angle here. We need to build new power plants to replace older ones. New power plants should be built with the latest technology in solar, wind, and nuclear. Maybe that's too close to socialism for the pseudo-left, who seem more interested in returning us to the dark ages and the feudal era. If Trotsky was fascinated by a power plant built on a peat bog, wonder what he would have thought of nuclear and solar?
Fossil fuels have to go, if for no other reason than they will run out on a time scale that is short enough (hundreds of years) that we damned well ought to be planning ahead. Somethingsomething responsibility.
Eh but let me guess. Coal and nat gas are the only options because otherwise "there is no money!" or "it's not profitable!" Fuck the profit system. We need power. We need power plants, especially if we plant to support somewhere around 10 billion people on this planet. This is an equation we have to make work and can make work, because we want to advance, not regress. 10 billion people living in a clean, sustainable global civilization is ambitious, but I think we can do it. Just not in the capitalist era.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:12PM (7 children)
If you think we live in a "capitalist" era you are pretty deluded. "Capitalists" aren't the ones promoting constant inflation to collect seignorage and keep their Ponzi scheme alive.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:14PM (6 children)
This is hardly off-topic. If you want to successfully solve a problem you need to correctly identify the root cause. The root cause is quite simply that the current world economic system requires infinite growth to not collapse. This system is controlled by central banks and governments. Just read "financial news", it is all about central banks, trade wars, trump tweets, etc.
Here is the current set of headlines on Reuters:
https://i.ibb.co/NZR6B6L/finance.png [i.ibb.co]
Topics:
Federal Reserve rate cuts
Chinese Tariffs
Trump
Us factory orders
New head of the European Central Bank
Hong Kong regulator
Federal Housing Finance Agency
So the only non-government focused story is "US factory orders".
And just look at the circus around every FOMC statement where people all around the world are trying to interpret why they changed single words or phrases:
https://www.forexlive.com/centralbank/!/fomc-statement-redline-20171213 [forexlive.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremlinology [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @10:19PM (5 children)
Keep digging, root doesn't end there, is just a little farther to go :-)
This seems relevant to your interests: Wall Street rules [wsws.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @10:44PM (4 children)
What aspect of the actual information there do you think is in conflict with what I said? I see random mentions of "capitalist" that have nothing to do with reality. Central banks and governments and to a much lesser extent corporations are in charge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @11:46PM (3 children)
Nothing in conflict. It seems like you and the wswswswsws both share a healthy contempt for the Fed and corporations, so I'm hoping they might prod you in the right direction. Your analysis seems to be going in the right direction, especially wrt needing infinite growth to make the system work. The Accumulation of Capital [marxists.org] (Luxemburg) may also be relevant to your interests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:03AM (2 children)
I see a missing type of organization there... but I will check out your link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:06AM (1 child)
Yea, checked it. At first glance it is the same old boring ideas that require mass murder to work in theory and still fail despite mass murder in practice.
If you claim it is different then let me know.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @01:28AM
https://www.quora.com/What-has-killed-more-people-communism-or-capitalism [quora.com]
https://eand.co/if-communism-killed-millions-how-many-did-capitalism-kill-2b24ab1c0df7 [eand.co]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:32PM (4 children)
Uh...what? You are claiming that people on the left DON'T want renewable energy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @06:25PM
Pseudo-left--people using leftist language in service of right-wing, regressive agendas that will increase wealth disparity without doing much about AGW. A pseudo-left plan would include finance capital, lots of pork, etc while placing the bill at the feet of those least capable of paying for it (the working class).
A leftist plan would tackle it as an engineering problem and send the bill to the 1%ers.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday July 03 2019, @08:30PM (2 children)
I'm not sure about that, but I would say the typical "Left" person is against nuclear. Nuclear is the only real solution. Solar might supplement things, but at really large scales, solar also has an impact on the environment from manufacturing to handling of defunct panels. I'm not convinced wind power can solve our issues, and that's using the highly advanced and compact solid state wind generators. Those have the same environmental foot print issue related to manufacturing.
Considering what is at stake, I think we should be building nuclear reactors underground as fast as we possibly can. Nuclear is a dirty word though, even when we talk about advanced designs using Thorium that are far safer than any traditional reactor.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 03 2019, @08:46PM (1 child)
Well THIS lefty is vociferously PRO nuclear.
I'll take a localized pollution issue over a global one any day of the week!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @11:57PM
Vociferous here too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:45PM (2 children)
A few years ago I did an analysis of how many nuclear power plants, solar farms, wind farms, etc. we'd have to build to replace the existing power infrastructure.
Using extremely aggressive (impossible to attain) construction schedules, it would still take orders of magnitude more years than we have.
In other words, we're trapped in a box with no way out but to suffer through it.
The only question is, how long will we suffer?
The real crime is that we KNOW what parts of the world will be hardest hit, and how many will die.
It's not widely discussed, but the US Govt. conducts and publishes pretty good research on this every couple of years. I have a copy that was published under G.W.Bush. (that's right. Bush, the climate denier in chief, also commissioned and published some damn good scholarly research on the threats we face from unchecked global warming.) The confusion in the public is, in fact, due to efforts by the wealthy (people, corporations, countries... take your pick) to obfuscate the issue. Why do they do this? Here's where it gets messy--
There is only one way to really fix the problem. It's not just energy production. It's also deforestation, farming and pollution that creates massive dead zones in the oceans. The only way to really fix the problem is for there to be fewer people. We are way past the carrying capacity of the planet, but also of our own technology. Like another poster said, we have a $100K income, but we're spending $115K per year. (not 3%, it's really more like 15% or 20%.) This can go on for a while, but sooner or later we're going to have to cull the herd. (unless -- like happened with Malthus -- some kind of major technological breakthrough happens, like, tomorrow.)
How do you achieve that culling without massive controversy??? Simply let it happen. Also move your own family and friends to more survivable areas.
I know, I know, it sounds conspiratorial. That's because it is. If you do enough research and go beyond what's being publicly talked about, you can't help but find this same conclusion.
What about that problem of an economy that depends on infinite growth? It's called a reset. Back when the plague killed 1/4 - 1/3 of all humans on the planet, it was bad at first, but within one generation the quality of life and standard of living shot up to never before seen levels of comfort and stability. Everyone felt rich, because the established infrastructure had been built for a much larger population.
Why am I posting as AC?
You figure it out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:55PM
link plz
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:41PM
We'd just have to build faster than that. Impossible doesn't mean much when one can scale construction projects to far greater levels than you are speaking of.
How strong is this dependence? When is that dependence going to matter? Even if we have an economy that is strongly dependent on growth, it can "reset" after we've developed far longer longevity, brought the entire world to developed world status, and established an interplanetary civilization. There's plenty of room for growth and an economy that supposedly wants to do that. Let's use this convenient tool at hand to get what we want.
As to the narrative about being beyond the carrying capacity of Earth, there'd be more problems, if that really were true. Humanity and its environment would be under more stress than it presently is. The narrative is poorly fitting reality as usual.
Too lazy to log in.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @02:46PM
It's not the overall percentages which matter. It's that when a system is balanced (in equilibrium, if you will), everything's fine. Disrupting that balance can have unfortunate consequences. Humans are REALLY good at finding ways to disrupt otherwise-balanced systems. For example - let's say you have some kind of large, ill-tempered desert animal which you use to carry heavy loads. Its muscles and skeleton can carry up to a certain weight without collapsing - call that Weight X. (Because go over that, the spine breaks and you have an eX-animal.)
Load up your beast all the way up to Weight X. You're fine, the beast is grumpy but it's okay. Everything's good. Now your neighbor comes along and tosses just one more piece of straw on top because "what's one more bit? What percent am I really adding to the load?"
That straw which broke your camel's back... how important was that again?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:19PM
If you mean the delta y on the graph? probably About 200% right now, though as warming continues there will be some positive feedback loops that will drop it below that.
If we cut our emissions to zero, and let unchecked wildlife growth happen, let all our crop fields go fallow and the like(utterly untennable and no one is proposing it) there's good reason, looking at intra-annual carbon cycles, to believe that net carbon uptake would occur. About 15 billion tons per year uptake. This shouldn't be particularly surprising, trees and brushlands(and oh man corals) hold carbon down a lot longer than cornfields and rice paddies.
If you mean in a strict, disconnected from carbon-cycle point of view, literal masses exhaled by non-farm animals(about 15% of total animal biomass on earth) and produced by geological processes, about 70-90% are anthropogenic.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:51PM (5 children)
That's not the relevant question.
An analogy:
If you earn $100,000 a year and spend $100,000 a year then everything is fine (well, you of course should save something, but that's besides the point). If you increase your spending by a mere 3%, that means you'll be starting to collect debt. And then you'll not get rid of the debt if you just return to your previous spending habits. Indeed, thanks to interest it will keep growing.
You can't say "oh, but that's merely 3%, that's virtually nothing!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:59PM (4 children)
That is only true in the case of positive interest rates. Lots of places have negative interest rates now, so you actually get paid to go into debt (eg for a mortgage) and lose money by saving.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/bankers-stunned-as-negative-rates-sweep-across-danish-mortgages [bloomberg.com]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-21/the-world-now-has-13-trillion-of-debt-with-below-zero-yields [bloomberg.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:07PM (3 children)
Oh, how droll you are! Brava, darling!
Except GP's "example" was a metaphor for greenhouse gas emissions.
Please explain how your "negative interest rate" applies there?
What? It doesn't? Gosh, that's such a shame. I knew there was a foul smell somewhere. Now I know what it is -- you talking out of your ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:17PM
Negative interest rates mean more debt -> more unnecessary "economic activity" -> more CO2 emissions
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
Well, as you increase the debt (CO2 level) with a negative interest rate (plants grow faster) you can stabilise at a new equilibrium ($103K income, $103K expenses)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:25PM
About half of the photosynthesis is done by algae in the ocean. More CO2 means the ocean water gets more acidic. I'm not sure that stimulates algae growth.
(Score: 4, Touché) by RamiK on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:35PM (23 children)
You might as well stand in a room beset by fire proudly declaring you refuse to run away until the fire marshal declares the fire accidental.
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(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:53PM
No joke, ah well can't fix stupid.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by deimtee on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:00AM (21 children)
When you stand in a room and people keep telling you it is going to burn in thirty years, you probably do have time to ask how and why.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:30AM (11 children)
It's not about the time. It's about questioning if its human-made or not as if it matters.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:11PM (10 children)
Because if the percent of human-made doesn't matter when the Earth is heating up, then it doesn't matter when one is trying to cool the Earth off. You have to understand the argument first.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday July 05 2019, @09:58PM (9 children)
What gave you that idea? We can engineer the climate by either releasing chemicals to the atmosphere or building nuclear powered plants that remove CO2 from the air. We can divert rivers. We can plant trees in the deserts. It being a natural disaster or man-made means nothing.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 09 2019, @03:56PM (8 children)
The initial premises did. If the radical environmental changes that humanity is currently making to the Earth don't change global temperature (for example, we're already releasing chemicals to the atmosphere, building nuclear plants, etc), then why expect that future such activity will somehow be different?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday July 10 2019, @09:01PM (7 children)
Since just because one cigarette doesn't kill you doesn't mean smoking a pack everyday is safe. That is, even if we amuse the notion current activities aren't causing climate change, it doesn't mean more of them won't worsen it or climate and environmental engineering to "compensate" for won't help.
That's to say, even if we disagree on some figures, we can agree there should be a limit to how much the ecosystem can regulate. And therefore, it should be possible to reverse certain conditions, human made or otherwise, by breaking those limits.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 11 2019, @11:46PM (6 children)
It's more than that. It's like assume for the sake of argument that smoking a pack a day doesn't increase your health risks, but then claiming if you have health risks from other generic sources similar to what is stereotypically thought of as cigarette smoking health risks, then smoking less will improve your overall health risks. You are implicitly continuing to assume what you claim you aren't assuming.
In other words, these things, for the sake of argument, are supposed to have very small marginal harm (that is, an increase in the activity results in small harm). Why suddenly do they have large marginal harm in the presence of some other harm? What's the mechanism? You aren't analyzing well enough your assumptions.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday July 12 2019, @01:36PM (5 children)
But this is exactly how half-toxicity, infections and the immune system work. Normally you can handle toxins and handle bacteria up to a certain amount, but if your system gets compromised those figures drop. And it doesn't matter if the compromise is over something you did or not. It's there. And cutting on toxins will help.
The mechanism is the science but we've put it aside for the sake of argument and chose to ignore the scientist and just go by logic. And by logic, it's more reasonable to assume limits rather than infinite linear/exponential potential. That is, there are tipping point to large systematic changes that can cause big changes fast irrespective of human activity but that can be averted through human activity.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 13 2019, @04:57AM (4 children)
Except, of course, for the huge range of circumstances where it isn't how that "exactly" works - such as climatology for a glaring example. You have claimed for the sake of argument that a certain activity doesn't increase harm and then claim without any subsequent justification that decreasing the activity can decrease harm. Somehow the marginal harm of the activity has changed without explanation. While the toxicity model you describe above, could at certain points of its range of toxicity, justify your argument (and wouldn't at many other points!), you haven't shown it applies at the half-toxicity points of the model that you claim, "exactly" or otherwise.
I think fundamentally, the dissonance here is the claim that we have a steering wheel for controlling climate change, even though the steering wheel, for the sake of argument, wasn't strong enough to maneuver us even a little into the situation of global warming. You need some justification stronger than that you could contrive situations where this could somehow be true. You now have to show that these contrived situations are applicable.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday July 14 2019, @02:26PM (3 children)
From a load bearing beam to the climate, limits are shared between all real world systems. Climate models, in the end, reflect the fact the earth can't dissipate heat short of some infra red radiation. The exact limits and mechanisms can be disputed, but eventually we have to concede to the fact that whether or not we're causing the changes, they're happening and stuff like limiting greenhouse gasses is a no brainier.
If you want a detailed discussion about the mechanisms you'll have to take it with a climatologist. But I doubt any will humor the man-made or not premise of this thread. After all, the greenhouse model is basic thermodynamics and chemistry and the rise in CO2 levels is such an easily observed and explained phenomena (dig out oil, burn it, measure mass going in, measure mass in the atmosphere, conclude it's man-made) that you might as well ask an engineer to explain alternating current without going into complex numbers.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 15 2019, @03:59AM (2 children)
Which is sufficient once you get to space. Climate models typically don't reflect the more complex dynamics, we call "weather" which can substantially increase the heat radiated to space.
But if they did, they would be subject to the same logical constraints as you.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday July 16 2019, @08:25AM (1 child)
I was referring to the classic dealing with the absolute limits of earth's energy production and heating issues: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ [ucsd.edu]
Not sure how space exploration gets you anywhere given that.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:48AM
Notice the line that destroys the physicist's whole shtick:
That was one of the first lines out of the mouth of the economist. Sure, the economist didn't cover himself in glory after that, but that line was never addressed. Exponential energy/population growth is not a requirement for exponential economic growth (notice how the physicist shoe-horned the discussion into such things as "traditional growth" in order to hit the right talking points)..
How much energy does it take to know how to do something? Or to live longer? There's a lot of high value things out there that aren't significantly energy or population dependent. Computers didn't increase in speed exponentially because people threw more energy at them
Nor does the economy need to grow exponentially till the heat death of the universe in order to check off some important, near future boxes for us, such as the above knowing more stuff and living longer.
Finally, there is a bit of hypocrisy here. The physicist after all deals routinely with models that work, but only within a parameter range or for a certain length of time. It's not like someone is using Keynesian economics to predict what Earth will be like in a billion years. These economic models are being used over spans of time where it is reasonable to expect that they will work and not deviate much.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday July 04 2019, @08:37AM (8 children)
What? You think this is all far off in the future? The room is burning NOW. Do you not watch the news? Are you not aware of the heatwaves, the forest fires, the flooding? The coral die-offs and deforestation that is ALREADY HAPPENING?
The grand, unplanned experiment in atmospheric modification is already well underway and the results are clearly visible. The only question is, how much worse do you want it to be for your grandkids?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:59PM (4 children)
I think whether it is happening now, in thirty years, or never, the correct course of action is not to run around in a panic doing stupid things.
The correct course is to objectively examine the evidence, propose and debate the various mitigation strategies, evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies and implement the ones that will do the most good for the least cost. Funnily enough, that entails research and design and some far reaching policy decisions.
It does not include running in circles screaming about the sky falling and how it is heresy to even think about questioning the High Priests of the Church of Carbon, or The Voice Of Panic on Mass Media.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @11:53PM (1 child)
That is precisely what has been going on, however the doomsday messages have increased in volume in a vain attempt to reach the brainwashed masses buying the propaganda from rich assholes trying to improve their own bottom line.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @08:48AM
If you know anything about science, then you should know why that approach should fail.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday July 05 2019, @08:31AM (1 child)
That's precisely what climate scientists have trying to do for the last 3 or 4 decades. It's not their fault you've been listening to big oil instead of them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @08:47AM
Where's the discussion or explanation for the public of the error in important parts of the AGW models? Where's the addressing of the persistent biases in favor of exaggerating climate change? When are those climate scientists going to call out the climate scientists who've made a career out of selling doomsday?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @11:13PM (2 children)
Where's the evidence for your assertion?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 05 2019, @07:45AM (1 child)
Take off your blindfolds, and you'll see it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @08:43AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:55PM
Why does this matter? If the CO2 is not man-made, we can just ask for damages from $nature when we all start dying?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:32AM (7 children)
>Just askin', how much % of CO2 is man related, or anthropogenic if you like big words, compared to total emissions?
That *is* the question - but it's not quite specific enough. There are two different carbon cycles going on:
- the ecological carbon cycle, where carbon cycles through living things: plants absorb CO2 to build cellulose, sugar, etc., and animals, mold, etc, eat plants to release that carbon back into the air as CO2. There's an *enormous* amount of carbon flow in that cycle, but it's fairly stable - the total amount of carbon basically doesn't change as there's nowhere for it to go to or come from except as a trickle.
- the geological carbon cycle is that trickle - where CO2 gets sequestered in rock by diatoms, etc. falling as sediment to the ocean floor, along with weathering of silicate minerals into carbonates by carbonic acid (atmospheric CO2 dissolved in water), and the growth or roots and other subsurface organisms that sequester it underground, and gets released into the atmosphere from the oxidation of some carbon-rich rocks that are freshly exposed to air by erosion and earthquakes, and volcanoes of course.
It's the geologic carbon cycle that where human activity comes into play - we're taking carbon that was sequestered underground millions of years ago, and burning it to introduce new CO2 into the atmosphere. Cement production also produces a lot of new CO2 by driving off the carbon from carbon-rich minerals used in its construction.
So how fast does carbon get sequestered?
3Gton/yr from land organisms creating soil.
2Gton/yr from ocean sediments burying carbon under the sea floor
0.054GTon/yr released by volcanoes
So a net of ~5GTon per year is sequestered
And humans? We release about 6-10 Gtons/year from fossil fuel use, cement production, etc.
So, we're introducing about 120%-180% as much geologic carbon every year as is being sequestered.
Does that answer your question?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @01:32AM (5 children)
Without human carbon release your figures have a net loss of about 4.95 GTon per year.
That doesn't add up unless you want to claim that humans came along and started burning carbon just in time to save the biosphere. That is not a popular opinion with climate alarmists.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:37PM (4 children)
You are correct. I couldn't find a decent breakdown of environmental carbon sources, (other than volcanoes that always seem to get dragged up and I felt needed to be put in proper perspective). Probably safe to assume they're similar to the sequestering rates though, since historical carbon records suggest that atmospheric CO2 levels had been holding fairly steady. We're still producing more than those sources, total.
At the end of the day, it doesn't necessarily matter. We can measure how fast CO2 levels are changing in the atmosphere, and we can calculate reasonably accurately how fast humans are putting fossil CO2 into the atmosphere (1 gallon gas = 20lbs CO2, etc). And the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing more slowly than we are releasing it.
It's kind of like filling a swimming pool connected to vast underground plumbing system. You don't know what exactly is going on in all those pipes, but you *do* know how fast your hose is adding water, and that the swimming pool is filling up more slowly than it would if it were sealed. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that the pool would be going down without your help.
>That doesn't add up unless you want to claim that humans came along and started burning carbon just in time to save the biosphere. That is not a popular opinion with climate alarmists.
Not until you add an extra fact that doesn't seem to get enough air time: The Earth's climate is bistable - think of it like a ball getting jostled around in big "W"-shaped pipe. It's going to want to be at one of those two bottom points, and if you push it away, it's going to want to fall back. Through geologic time (long before complex life existed) we've several times toggled back and forth between the current "ice house" state, with year-round ice caps and glaciers constantly coming and going, and the "hot house" state it was when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, tropical forests covered the poles, and vast deserts were not uncommon.
The entire history of the human species has taken place in the icehouse state, where the climate wanders between glacial "ice ages", and moderate interglacial periods. Human civilization was born in the midst of the most recent warm interglacial period, we're about as warm as it gets without some major event to heat us up with that extra big shove to get us over the midpoint of the W and sliding into a hothouse state. And we're providing that by adding CO2 to the atmosphere at a geologically unprecedented rate.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday July 05 2019, @05:27AM (3 children)
Here's a probably unpopular theory.
The rate of non-biological CO2 supply is not controlled by the biosphere. (Volcanoes, crude oil seeps, limestone weathering)
Carbon sequestration, either limestone or fossil fuels is biological.
Excluding recent fossil fuel burning and very short term volcanic spikes, we never see increasing total CO2.
Which leads to :
If the rate of sequestration was limited by anything other than the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then there would be periods where the amount of available CO2 was increasing. The long stable period of CO2 in the atmosphere is strong evidence that if excess carbon dioxide is available, it will get sequestered. Either long term as limestone, or as increased biomass in the system.
In fact the long slow decline in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere probably correlates well with slowly increasing plant efficiency.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @09:53AM (2 children)
I believe that occurs during glacial periods. Not sure how much - internet sucks too much at present to look. Covering most of your land in ice would seem to inhibit CO2 intake by vegetation - which is an effect not present now.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday July 05 2019, @12:03PM (1 child)
A geologist once told me that the rate of limestone deposition from shellfish would completely remove all carbon from the biosphere in about 10,000 years if it wasn't being replaced. I assume that too would slow down during an ice age, but it wouldn't stop completely.
Ooooh here's a thought. What if ice ages occur when too much carbon is sequestered by the bio processes. Everything gets cold and inactive, or dead, until volcanoes emit enough CO2 to warm the place up again. Planet gets warm, plants grow like crazy in the high CO2, the CO2 level drops and the cycle continues.
Given the way life adapts, I think the limit on the mass of the biosphere is : (all of the carbon) - (all the CO2 in the atmosphere at the point where plants can no longer extract it.)
The sudden burning of all that coal and oil is a blip on the graph in the long term. Plants will eat it all.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday July 06 2019, @05:26AM
Hmm, my (obviously 100% accurate /sarcasm) chart says ocean sediment sequesters carbon at about 0.2Gton/year, which in 10,000 years would be around 2,000Gton, which would indeed exceed the ~1,400Gton of carbon it says are present in the atmosphere and vegetation.
That would be somewhat consistent with ice age temperature patterns - a long slow decline across several thousand years followed by a sudden jump to warm temperatures, and then the cycle repeats.
Well, except for the sudden jump bit - and I do mean *sudden*, like +15C at northern latitudes over the course of a few decades. Those tend to coincide with Milankovitch cycle peaks, so the variations in Earth's solar input is primed to enable a transition, but the transition itself is something sudden. Though I suppose a centuries-long buildup of CO2 until the combination of it and increasing solar input crossed a tipping point would explain it. As soon as things started warming enough, thawing permafrost, etc. would speed things up rapidly - you think modern permafrost thaws are substantial, imagine the situation if glaciers extended into the tropics! As they receded they'd expose permafrost that had been buried in ice
Now that I think of it - I've actually heard it speculated that humanity might have helped extend the most recent, unusually long, interglacial period. We developed agriculture shortly after the big thaw, and unlike animals and hunter-gatherers, who move on when the climate cools, farmers have a substantial investment in immobile farms and buildings. And so they throw more wood on the fire, pumping more CO2 back into the atmosphere and slowing the cooling process. That would be something, wouldn't it? If the relatively stable global climate our civilizations have all flourished in were actually an anomaly we ourselves created with our resistance to change? It would suggest that we've been modifying the environment on a global scale far longer than we imagined, and might really want to choose our actions carefully as the length of our lever balloons.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:22PM
It did raise another one I was curious about. What percentage change is that in the total amount of carbon in the biosphere?
So, I went and looked it up. Biosphere = 2000 Gton of carbon. Emissions = 5 Gton of CO2 = 1.3 Gtons of C.
1.3/2000 = 0.065% per year.
Not critical in any one year, but not something you would want to go on for too long unless you knew the system could handle it. It is also probably less than the other effects we are having through deforestation and desertification.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @02:02PM (56 children)
How about humans just adapt just like they have always done before?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @02:08PM (41 children)
The real goal is to misdirect people's blame from the collapse of the global economic ponzi that has been created as the perpetrators seize even more power.
You can tell because if you suggest people do anything on their own to plan for climate change you'll get called a troll. The only acceptable solution is for governments and corporations to become more powerful.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by choose another one on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:14PM (40 children)
> The real goal is to misdirect people's blame from the collapse of the global economic ponzi that has been created as the perpetrators seize even more power.
Not quite, the real goal is to perpetuate the current system by deluding the people as to what the real choices actually are.
The problems is that "renewables" is just another marketing scam that makes more money for the suppliers of a dodgy product. Renewable energy can never, ever, give us the power and security of supply that we exist with now at a price we are collectively willing to pay. The problems are fundamental:
* the required physical space (compare size of multi GW wind/solar and multi GW coal or nuclear plant)
* location/transmission (remote locations that have the space require difficult and expensive transmission to get power to where it is needed)
* variability and non-existence of effective mass storage (yeah, "smart grids" will solve all that - where "smart grid" = "load-shed the poor folk first")
* often "renewable" simply has a different environmental cost - back in the 80's hydro power was going to be the great saviour, sustainable, controllable, security of supply, seems strangely out of favour now... because we've figured out how bad it is
"Sustainable" energy provision at our current level of civilisation simply isn't possible with current tech (yeah, fusion is 20yrs away). See e.g.: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/06/the-reason-renewables-cant-power-modern-civilization-is-because-they-were-never-meant-to [forbes.com]
The real choices are:
* accept climate change and deal with the effects
* get rid of way more that half of world population
* cease / reverse "development" so that the current world population has a living standard about the average of current sub-Saharan Africa, and stays there
Ain't no one saying that though, apparently not a popular set of options...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:26PM (18 children)
This sounds fine to me... What is the problem?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:53PM (17 children)
The problem is that the effects may well cause options 2 and 3 combined.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @04:04PM (11 children)
So can lots of other things (solar flare, asteroid, nuclear war, poleshift, etc).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:23PM (9 children)
That's like saying "I could die from being run over by a rhinoceros, from being smothered by a warmth-seeking raccoon that snuck into my home, from sheer exhaustion of humping every starlet now living, from being buried under so much money I simply could not draw enough air to breathe... so it doesn't matter if I walk out in front of a speeding truck."
You has the dumbs. Seek help.
--
Reality is that thing which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:42PM (8 children)
Uh no. You should simply prepare for scenarios that are common to many possible threats. It is going to be the people sitting on the coasts waiting for someone else to do something that get screwed over the worst. The people prepping for a grand solar minimum, etc will also be better prepared for warming anyway.
(Score: 3, Troll) by fyngyrz on Wednesday July 03 2019, @06:11PM (7 children)
Uh no.
Climate change is the truck. It's coming. All you have to do is look at the data.
And no, it won't just be people on the coasts.
It's going to affect agriculture and livestock, and therefore what you can eat, and what that costs you.
It's going to affect weather, and therefore the costs of insurance, housing materials and any compensating that needs to be done.
It's going to affect land/home availability, prices and rents everywhere as the coasts become less livable.
It's going to acidify the oceans, and therefore affect the price and availability of sea-based foodstuffs. Even if the temperature changes are able to be accommodated by sea life moving around, the change in water chemistry will only be survivable by organisms that (a) evolve very quickly and (b) can find adequate forage in the reduced food circumstances they find themselves existing in. This is a big one; people seem to really overlook the impact that significant changes to ocean chemistry will almost certainly bring. The oceans feed a lot of people. If that stops, there's going to be some pretty notable unrest, even if nothing else happens.
It's going to create (more) desperate people pretty much no matter what.
All of this is only as inevitable as we let it be. We don't have to walk in front of that truck. Although I have to say, at least here in the US, we're walking and not looking nearly hard enough, because... dumb.
Whereas the asteroid and similar? Yeah, if one arrives, there won't be shite you can do about it.
As I said: you has the dumbs.
--
Rap is to music what stale convenience store sandwiches are to fine cuisine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @06:17PM (5 children)
There are people who have years of food saved up with their residence(s) in strategic locations who are spending this time to learn survival skills. They are doing this because they looked at the data and it shows we are due for a mini-ice age. The CO2 warming may or may not eventually happen later but that hardly matters if the cold wipes you out first...
Say they are wrong and warming happens. Do you think they will be better or worse off than people living in coastal cities waiting for the government to do something?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:20PM (4 children)
It's already happening. No matter how many people die from extremes of weather, there'll always be deniers refusing to call it climate change. No true Scotsman.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:26PM (2 children)
I think you misunderstood my post. I am talking about people who believe they have reason to be very worried about much bigger and threatening climate change than what you are referring to. The problems in TFS are simply negligible in comparison.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:42PM (1 child)
Yeah I get that you're talking about people preparing for widespread harm / possible social breakdown from bigger changes in climate. My point is that if someone is already killed as a result of current changes in the climate, it won't matter to them how negligible or threatening people say it is.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:53PM
Ok, well my point is if they (or their family/community/government/whatever) would have prepared more for bigger changes in climate (or whatever threat) then those people wouldn't have died. The people preparing in general are going to be far better off almost no matter what the threat is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @10:15AM
So what? What's the increase in deaths from slightly worse weather extremes? Meanwhile a fossil fuel based developed world economy can reduce deaths from extremes of weather, whether caused by global warming or not, by orders of magnitude.
Sorry, it's pretty stupid to angst over extremes of weather when basic emergency preparedness, which covers far more than just climate change-induced extreme weather, can vastly reduce the harm just by itself. Among other things, it shows you're not even serious about solving these problems.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @10:09AM
Data like 4mm of sea level rise per year? You do realize that's only 40 cm of sea level rise a century? That's one really slow moving truck.
Yes, the dire effects could, maybe include slightly higher food prices and desperate farmers profitably farming stuff presently growing slightly closer to the equator.
But not even within an order of magnitude of any reform of those industries.
To the contrary, the coasts remain quite livable, they just move slightly and maybe have slightly more storm damage. Some increase in storm damage does seem to be a likely effect of global warming.
Slightly acidify. Notice how often the terms "slight" and "slightly" appear in reference to descriptions of climate change.
But the economic activity that we thereby do may create orders of magnitude (more) less desperate people which swamp the problem above.
Let us note here that you haven't even established that doing something about climate change is even slightly better than not doing something about climate change. Meanwhile basic emergency preparedness (as one of the common sense things advocated by the grandparent) works for a variety of threats, including a large portion of the global warming-induced ones. It shouldn't be a mystery why the developed world has seen orders of magnitude drop in deaths from extreme weather despite its alleged increase in frequency due to climate change.
Not being at the point of impact is a huge thing you can do about asteroids. Another example of what one can do is food security, which conveniently addresses a variety of problems including climate change and large asteroid impacts.
I find it interesting how you can reply to a common sense post like that with such stupid bullshit and then accuse them of "having the dumbs".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @11:06PM
Probability says [wikipedia.org]: You're talking out of your ass.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:19PM (4 children)
The obvious rebuttal is that the effects haven't caused options 2 and 3 combined yet. Instead, we've seen the greatest improvement in the human condition ever. The narrative isn't matching reality.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:19PM (3 children)
You know the story about the man who fell from the top of a skyscraper?
Every time he passed a further floor, he noted: “Well, up to now, nothing bad happened.”
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:26PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 05 2019, @07:39AM (1 child)
Well, I don't know about you, but I don't consider graduation to be a catastrophic event.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @09:11AM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:54PM (20 children)
Well, I'd like to challenge you on some of those assumptions about renewables, but I'm sure someone else will do so. Instead, I'd like to add another option to your very limited list of apathy. How about:
* Stop wasting obscene amounts of energy and resources on shit we don't need?
I'm not saying everyone has to go eat tofu in a yurt, but be honest: Does everyone really NEED a huge gas-guzzling 5-7 seater car all to themselves? What if we made it easier for people to commute less, or to share cars or even (gasp) get people using public transport? Or what about diet? Sure, I know people like their meat, but the carbon footprint is huge. What if everybody, for the good of everybody, were to halve their meat intake? Some people live quite happily on no meat at all, so your average punter should be able to make a huge difference without going full veggie. Oh, and while we're at it, how about people not buying loads more food than they need only to chuck it into landfill as soon as it hits the "best before" date? What if we were to seriously question the amount of plastic shit that gets manufactured in China, shipped half way round the world to fill Christmas stockings, and ends up in landfill before February? How about addressing instagram-fuelled "Fast Fashion" where idiots buy whole new outfits of cheap clothes only to throw them away after the first wearing? I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Our society is wasteful. There are plenty of savings we could make, drastic savings, if only there weren't so many people making money from the destructive status quo. And if we had made those changes 30 years ago when the warning flags were first raised, things wouldn't be anywhere near so desperate now.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @04:01PM (2 children)
That is what people have been saying. All you need to do to accomplish that is have a deflationary currency so people are rewarded for saving.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:27PM (1 child)
And/or interest rates that actually reward saving in the amounts the typical person can manage.
Ask your bank what a savings account will earn. Such an account is utterly pointless today.
--
After my girl turned vegan, it was
like I'd never seen herbivore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:48PM
The opposite is on its way: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=32428&page=1&cid=862764#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:05PM (4 children)
Another huge culprit is home air conditioning. Actually our central air gave out almost three years ago...we're actually due for a new furnace and AC...just haven't gotten around to it. I have to say though this is the third year we've gone without it (New Jersey) and there have only been a few times I missed it much.
What blows me away is that there are a lot of people who literally cool their homes in the summer down to a temperature that's actually lower then the temperature the heat it to in the winter! I mean FFS...adapt to the climate a little. At one job I had years ago I almost needed fucking gloves to code in the middle of August due to that bullshit. I mean come on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @10:46PM (2 children)
And this is a feedback loop: climate gets hotter -> people use more air conditioning which causes more greenhouse gasses -> climate gets hotter
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:13PM (1 child)
That loop is dependent upon one particular toxic link: power generation that generates those greenhouse gasses. Typically other types of pollution as well.
Many types of power generation do not do that. Those are the ones we should be developing in order to replace the toxic power generation systems. That will break the loop.
The trick here is to convince the government and the public that this really needs to be done as in, "this is a fucking emergency, get after it."
I wouldn't get anyone's hopes up, though. I think the stupid is far too deeply rooted.
--
Fibonacci: it's as easy as 1, 1, 2, 3
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @09:18AM
So when will you try evidence? If the situation really is as dire as claimed, then there's evidence for that.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:10AM
What blows me away is that there are a lot of people who literally cool their homes in the summer down to a temperature that's actually lower then the temperature the heat it to in the winter!
I've seen a lot of that in some places. It has also been going on for a very long time. I remember learning to pack winter clothes for certain buildings during the summer in the US. The height of the wastefulness was that many of the younger women were running space heaters under their desks at the same time instead of just adding winter clothes when indoors during the summers.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:23AM (6 children)
With the utmost of respect, you're going the wrong direction with this. You cannot conserve or downsize your way out of climate change. It will not happen, and people will fight you tooth and nail all the way until you fail. You can reduce the energy consumption and CO2 production from the United States and Europe to zero and you've only bought yourself a couple of decades. Why? Because there are billions of people working to claw their way out of poverty in underdeveloped countries and they will not be stopped without anything short of globe-spanning genocide.
The only way to solve climate change is to create abundance. Any solution that does not create more abundance is a waste of time and money.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday July 04 2019, @11:35AM (5 children)
I think you missed a word. I think you probably meant to write The only way to solve climate change is to create sustainable abundance. Otherwise you're just making things worse
Which is kind of the point of downsizing: We already know how to do abundance, now let's make it more sustainable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:56PM (4 children)
Let us note that ElizabethGreene made a case for why abundance is more sustainable than its absence.
What needs to be downsized? Most of the stuff people talk about conserving, just isn't that valuable.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday July 05 2019, @05:15AM (3 children)
While you're banging out the semantics of getting what I meant out of what I said, can we take a look at...
I'm not that smart, and that's literally the off the top of my head list. If we get some smart people with actual clue thinking about this we can come up with ideas that have a real impact instead of making token gestures.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @09:03AM
We have an approach in the developed world that checks off a lot of nice boxes: greater wealth, lower human fertility, better environment, etc. And yet there's people arguing that we should short circuit it because it's wasteful in ways that aren't important, babbling about SUVs and meat intake in this thread alone.
Are we going to go with what works? Or are we going to pursue sexy, but destructive narratives?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday July 05 2019, @12:15PM (1 child)
I agree with most of your points, but with respect to point 2, I would point out that high or low temp doesn't really matter.
While a low temperature reaction would be nice, the CO2 is produced by the chemical reaction itself, not the heat. CaCO3 = CaO + CO2
Even if you use a nuclear power station to make your cement the process will still emit large quantities of CO2.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday July 05 2019, @05:22PM
There is a significant amount of dead dinosaur used to fuel the process, and that's the low hanging fruit. That said, I'm not going to complain at all if you find another way to do it that produces something other than CO2.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:25PM (4 children)
Energy is cheap and global warming isn't a big problem for the next few centuries, even should we choose to continue to use fossil fuels to provide that obscene amount of energy. What's the problem?
really means
The enormous drawback to public transportation is that so often, it doesn't go where you want to go, and hence, is slower than cars, the usual point to point transportation system that does go where you want to go.
My view is that human time and quality of life is more important than saving some modest amount of energy.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday July 05 2019, @08:47AM (3 children)
> What's the problem?
You are, apparently. A whole swathe of the population who is either so blindly contrarian to anything they perceive as a challenge to their political / economic dogma or so greedy/lazy that they can't even be bothered to contemplate that their actions might have consequences.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @09:10AM (2 children)
And now we're to the religious argument that the mental failwaves of the heretics are why we can't have good things. It's telling that you can't argue anywhere in this discussion on scientific grounds.
Of course, if you tried, you'd quickly find that there isn't scientific support for your continued assertions that we need to act right now to mitigate climate change as well as the implicit, economically ignorant assumption that such mitigation would actually work.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday July 05 2019, @01:39PM (1 child)
I'm not going to sit here and regurgitate half a century of climate science for you. (a) I don't have time and (b) it's a massive waste of time, since you will just shout NO NO NO THAT CAN'T BE TRUE LALALALALALA. It's not hard for you to find by yourself. It's solid science, backed and supported by the vast majority of scientists in relevant fields (and most scientists in other fields, for that matter.)
The only people who continue to go against it are people who stand to lose money - primarily, the oil companies - who have invested huge amounts of cash into anti-climate science FUD that has stuck hard with certain sections of the population, particularly those on the right-wing.
There is no religion here, only science.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 06 2019, @02:01AM
This is the typical religious argument - it's the fault of the skeptic that they don't believe. Handwaving about nebulous half centuries of scientific literature is no different that claiming that someone would believe, if they only listened to God or other deity.
Sure, it is. Meanwhile in the real world, there's quite a few scientists in related fields wondering what's going on in climatology with its crazy certainty, ridiculous data massaging, piles of speculative models - often several layers removed from reality, and peculiar blindnesses to implications of their research. And not much in the way of science that backs the urgency of global warming.
Then where is this anti-climate science FUD? It's remarkably invisible giving the huge budgets you claim they have. Most religions need an imaginary Satan to blame for failure. That box gets checked here as well.
If evidence was on your side, you wouldn't have to resort to these typical religious evasions. Similarly, that scientific community wouldn't have to suppress facts that run counter to the narrative, like the above uncertainty in climate models, the huge gap between present day climate-related changes and the supposed catastrophic future changes, or the serious economics problems with the mitigation strategies. Nor would those scientists have to hustle us like two bit con artists.
A huge example here is the history of the 1.5 C threshold. It started life as a 2 C threshold. Then when the IPCC had to reduce the bottom range of their temperature sensitivity of a doubling of CO2 from 2 C to 4.5 C to 1.5 C, simultaneously they decided that 1.5 C was an important threshold to avoid. My take is that nothing changed except that the real sensitivity of a doubling of CO2 was lower than they thought, probably in the 1.5 to 2.0 C range (else they wouldn't have bothered to lower it) and thus, they had to come up with an alternative strategy for encouraging radical climate change mitigation. Lowering the threshold to barely above present day levels, so that mitigation could be argued even in light of the huge uncertainty in temperature sensitivity, was the obvious choice.
As I see it, you and that scientific community had half a century to present that solid science, and you all failed, and as now, continue to fail. It's not Big Oil's imaginary propaganda, it's you.
At this point, you're just noise. I'm just not interested. And my take is that there's a growing number of people joining my camp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:16PM (3 children)
There is no doubt people will have to adapt.
The changes are evident already for a number of years and we are having to adapt. (Much more frequent and intense rain storms, in my neck of the woods.)
The question is: can we keep the changes from getting EVEN WORSE, but adaptation is simply a given in ANY scenario.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:24PM (2 children)
http://wiki.iceagefarmer.com/wiki/Grand_Solar_Minimum_Symptoms#Torrential_Rain.2FFlooding.2C_Droughts [iceagefarmer.com]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:55PM (1 child)
Herpy derpy dooooo
Watch out, the kool-aid is poisoned with CRISPR for stupidity!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @08:22PM
Keep downvoting reality at your own risk:
> "A number of documented incidents show the extent of the famine. Edward II, King of England, stopped at St Albans on 10 August 1315 and had difficulty finding bread for himself and his entourage; it was a rare occasion in which the King of England was unable to eat. The French, under Louis X, tried to invade Flanders, but in the low country of the Netherlands, the fields were soaked and the army became so bogged down that they were forced to retreat, burning their provisions where they left them, unable to carry them away. "
http://wiki.iceagefarmer.com/wiki/History [iceagefarmer.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:19PM (3 children)
Hey, that sounds like a much cheaper way to put humans on Mars!
People should just adapt to the environment!
Brilliant!
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:29PM (2 children)
Adaptation is a part of any serious plan for colonization of Mars. Building shirt-sleeve microenvironments on Mars (which is what all of them plan to do) is adaptation to the Martian environment. So your sarcasm is misplaced.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 08 2019, @04:36PM (1 child)
Drat! I hate it when I misplace my sarcasm.
I use it so much, I always try to put it back in the same place when I'm done with it.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 09 2019, @04:01PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday July 03 2019, @04:32PM (5 children)
How about if we take steps to make that adaptation the cause of as little suffering as possible?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @04:54PM
Sure, start with getting rid of the incentives to move to a flood plain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Program [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:35PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday July 04 2019, @01:09PM (2 children)
Because I believe that adaptation on a global scale will entail suffering at the individual scale— if you accept as true the prediction of climate catastrophe. I’m not totally convinced either way. I was just responding to the cavalier response of “don’t worry, we will adapt”.
Suffering, of course, can also result from economic collapse caused by bad policy, as you point out.
But I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone advocating for the climate of 1850 as a desired outcome. I always thought the objective was to avoid a future disaster.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:48PM
Cause yer not a droolin' varmint incapable of higher thinking!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:23PM
The 1.5 C limit mentioned in the story is such advocacy.